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Even if they use a nofollow attribute - They are certainly counted as a citation and verification source for local SEO while additionally. The Nofollow vs follow theory is difficult for large directory sites as they have a double edge sword. If they followed every link - then they become spam, if they follow only paid listings then they become a paid link network, so if they no follow everyone they protect Authority and Google/Bing can utilize them as an authority reference point.  That being said your website is likely to be crawled more frequently just being on a local directory.

Has anyone experienced any negative experiences using a JS onload event to show a particular tab opened to organic visitors vs front door traffic?

Any other thoughts on the subject are indeed appreciated.

would Google ignore your canonical tag in totality or for only the pages implemented incorrectly?

We have a list of crawled product search pages where pagination on Page 1 is indexed and crawled and page 2 and onward is noindex, noarchive follow as we want the links followed to the Product Pages themselves. (All product Pages have canonicals and unique URLs)  Orr search results will be increasing the sets, and thus Google will have more links to follow on our wesbite although they all will be noindex pages. will this impact our carwl budget and additionally have impact to our rankings?

Page 1 - Crawled Indexed and Followed

Page 2 onward - Crawled No-index No-Archive  Followed

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Phil G

Setting a Robots.txt file for the Dev Site to be No index was a correct response. You can also add a No index no follow meta tag to the Dev site as well.

Another step you can take is to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for the Dev site and block there as well.

Some dev sites are placed behind a firewall or require a sign on to access, this process can block google as well.

The risks you have is essentially creating an entire duplicate of your current website. Google will always try and crawl everything it can on the net regardless of Noindex tags. No index simply means please dont place in your index. It is important to remember that there are other Search Engines out there besides Google, Bing/yahoo, Ask, Blekko, etc... and all do not automatically honor the Noindex no follow tag. So any secure pages or documents should be just that - secured.

If those pages are no longer in the index, and are not security or confidential in nature I wouldn't worry too much.

• Phil G

Good add!

Hi Ron,

Yes it is widely known that Google uses Twitter as a ranking factor. Linked URLs etc... These are part of Social Metrics and Google+ as well as Facebook are part of this.

SEOmoz did a few lovely experiemnts related to this here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings

Essentially the SEO value of using any of these social sites would be similar in effect as to what hHigh Authority websites are. If you Tweet frequently and have a significant volume of other similarly active followers you influence is higher. Tweets and even re-tweets can influence this. I would recommend tweeting with purpose and linking out to core valuable pages where you can with context.

-Phil G

Joshua,

I would certainly look into where your link building strategies built your links into. There is a possibility that your site has placed inbound links on a spam site or a network that was hit. Other items may include quality level of content. If you are not using original authoritative content you could see a shit. One initial question is how has this impacted rankings for your primary keyword sets?

Revisit any work over the last 4 months you have done, you may have done some dev work that is negatively impacting you? What is your Google Webmasters Account saying? Has your page load time slowed down? Have you changed server environments? There are certainly a number of possibilities. If several of our clients are experiencing the same thing and you are hosting then look at the hosting level. If you are in a shared hosting environment then a spam site on the same server could impact you.

-Phil G

If they are the same product with a different capsule I would think about just treating it as a clothing retailer would treat a different color of a shirt, Same page different option. By reinforcing the core content to a single page you can leverage that weight vs, splitting it amongst certain pages. I am not familier with your industry or search keywords related to vegetarian vs. Gelatin. I would look into that. If there is any large volume of content related to Vegetarian vs. the actually vitamin content I would target your content there.

Your errors can be incurred for a number of reasons. You need to ensure you have a enough unique content per page, If you only have a few words or character of text related to any particular item and only a few unique words in the Title tag you will be flagged for duplication. Expand unique text where you can and ensure only Primary Brand Keywords are in the Title tag such that each page should have a majority of unique text. If your URLs are dynamic in nature investigate opportunities to make them Human Readable and in a structured format. SEOmoz has written numerous guides on URL structure. Place unique content wherever you can in images files names, alt text etc... Think minimum of 40% content differential per page including the site template. Too many links in a navigation can impact you if you have limited body content on a page.

Miketek is right. You have an invisible site to SEs which may as well not have any content at all from an SEO perspective.

I would focus your time on schema as it will likely deliver the most long term value. Are your videos hosted internally or externally on Vimeo or YouTube?

Are they actually two different products? If yes, is it possible additional descriptive content top be added to the page to differentiate them? Are they using dynamic URL variables or unique human readable text URLs? i.e. www.company.com/product?id=1234 vs. www.company.com/product/vitamins/bcaa-gelatin-capsules.

If you are using URL variables ensure they are set correctly via your Google/Bing Webmaster Tools account.

I would not recommend placing the canonical tags unless they are actually an identical product. Identify additional opportunities to input unique content relative to each product. Image Alt Tags and File names inclusive.

Yes all the code is HTML and CSS JS does not obfuscate any content.

Though I would ask the community this as it relates to positioning of external links on page vs. code and body vs footer.

Working with a strategic partner for some data sharing arrangements and the question exists whether followed links in the template footer to our partners website provide better value vs. Body Links with context behind a CSS Tab (All code for Tabbed content is resolved on the same page)?  Yes there are links coming back from the partner site as well.

Our website has some pages with content shared from a third party provider and we use AJAX as our implementation. We dont want Google to crawl the third party's content but we do want them to crawl and index the rest of the web page.  However, In light of Google's recent announcement about more effectively indexing google, I have some concern that we are at risk for that content to be indexed.

I have thought about x-robots but have concern about implementing it on the pages because of a potential risk in Google not indexing the whole page. These pages get significant traffic for the website, and I cant risk.

Thanks,

Phil

Thanks for the feedback.

I personally don't think any SEO Question is Naive, there are so many permutations and possibilities. And if you work with a large company and Large Dev Teams with Legacy Systems you are often put in scenarios that little questions like this are important and can dictate how entire scope may or may not be realised. I am compiling a comprehensive URL guidelines for my Devs (which I will certainly share with the SEOmoz community when complete.)

A little sideline note: Someone once told me Pipe Characters "|" won't impact a URL string. However, they actually frequently break, get truncated or double encoded  when being crawled from Google/Bing with little rhyme or reason.

The question about Brackets/Braces Stemmed from this link from Coke.  http://www.cokeunleashed.com.au/wagsallowance.jsp?mkwid={ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}WVnyieg7&pcrid=13521527730

Technically you don't need one.

However, It is so easy to put one in place (usually) and I would consider it a best practice. Like developing an application without taking notes on implementation. What happens when someone new comes along to work with it. They will ask the same question. Not having one and deliberately allowing the robots to crawl all are two inherently different things.

Was talking with a friend about this the other day.

Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?